Meet the Elemental Portfolio

Matt Caywood, CEO; Ryan Croft, COO; and David Nebinski, Head of Growth

The founding team of Actionfigure (formerly TransitScreen) shared a common goal: making real-time transit information available so people can make informed, sustainable decisions to get around cities. Co-founder Matt Caywood, an artificial intelligence engineer and applied neuroscientist, wanted to apply his skills to make public transit easier and more accessible to people – whether or not they have smartphones or other devices. Co-founder Ryan Croft realized the commercial potential of the solution by marketing the service to retail, multi-family, and office buildings.

About Actionfigure

Actionfigure developed a product that aggregates and displays transit options on digital screens that are updated automatically in real-time. Screens can be indoors or outdoors, and prominently display transportation options such as bikeshare, train, bus, rideshare, carshare, on-demand, and vanpools. By providing screens in open public areas, anyone can access transit information (no smartphone, data plan, or application required). Information is made accessible so that the blind and visually impaired can also receive transit information.

After launching their pilot project at Mobility Lab and then developing a scalable concept at the 1776 incubator in Washington D.C., Actionfigure entered Elemental Excelerator’s Go-to-market Track and tested their application in Honolulu at the Frank F. Fasi Civic Center and other locations. The company now has offices in Washington D.C., New York, San Francisco, Portland, Toronto, and London, with screens in 33 cities and 10 languages.

Founded by two graduates from the University of Melbourne, Allume began with the mission to extend the benefits of solar power to those who previously had no access. Starting with a focus on rural indigenous communities, Allume extended solar access via landlord-tenant power purchase agreements, targeting tenants experiencing financial stress. Their solution now extends these same benefits to multi-dwelling residents and commercial tenants through their unique electrical distribution technology.

The solution.

Allume makes solar accessible and affordable for multi-family residents. Their proprietary technology, called the SOLSHARE, optimally shares energy from a single solar system to multiple units. This behind-the-meter technology requires no change to the standard metering infrastructure or utility’s billing system, making it a scalable solution to democratize access to solar energy globally.

What makes them special?

Allume’s novel solution unlocks an unaddressed market for solar, removing the barriers to entry for multi-dwelling residents, and allowing solar providers to service a new and growing market without reliance on export incentives.

Dr. Seth Sanders has led research into innovative flywheel energy storage and power conversion technologies for the past two decades at U.C. Berkeley’s College of Engineering. In 2009, Seth teamed up with co-founder Ed Chiao to commercialize his laboratory research, giving rise to Amber Kinetics. Amber Kinetics is rooted in Seth and Ed’s shared belief that mechanical flywheel technology can make a meaningful contribution in the transition to clean energy by providing very low cost energy storage.

The solution.

While flywheel technology has been around for centuries, Amber Kinetics has evolved the concept by combining multiple breakthrough technologies with low-cost rotors that are made of 98% steel. The result is a flywheel that provides safe, economical, utility-scale energy storage. Amber Kinetics works with utilities and industrial organizations to balance the variability of renewable energy sources and to manage peak demand on electricity grids. Amber Kinetics is also an integrated manufacturer and asset developer, enabling project design flexibility and optimization. The flywheel is fully recyclable at the end of its 30-year lifespan.

Now let’s talk deployment.

Hawaii has the highest percentage of grid-tied renewable energy, most of which is intermittent. Amber Kinetics is partnering with Hawaiian Electric to deploy a single flywheel (8 kW, 32 kWh) energy storage system and to test variable speed control of the flywheel for faster, more agile response time and other utility use cases. With Amber Kinetic’s help, Hawaiian Electric can integrate variable solar generation, regulate local grid voltage and frequency, provide reactive power support, and prevent auto-disconnecting from the grid due to the generation variability with large amounts of solar saturation.

About Ambri

The core technology for Ambri was developed about ten years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Professor Don Sadoway and his PhD student David Bradwell. Ambri has been overcoming various technology and manufacturing hurdles and is now focused on scaling the development and deployment of its liquid metal batteries. The batteries are low cost due to the use of inexpensive, earth-abundant materials, and the straightforward manufacturing process that largely relies on welding steel. The liquid metal storage cells are small metal boxes filled with molten metal and vacuum sealed. The battery is about 900 degrees inside, but very well insulated and cool to the touch.

The technology is highly flexible as units range from 100 kilowatt-hours to hundreds of megawatt-hours, can respond to grid signals in milliseconds, and store 4-6 hours of energy with 80% roundtrip efficiency. The liquid metal battery technology has minimal cycle-by-cycle capacity degradation, which means that the battery could potentially last 15 years and tens of thousands of cycles without much loss in efficiency.

Project Description

Ambri partnered with utilities, renewable energy developers, and the University of Hawaii to evaluate the economic and operational impacts of a the liquid metal battery solution in Hawaii – especially focusing on the potential to reduce energy costs, increase electric reliability, and enable further adoption of renewable energy across the Hawaiian Islands.

The solution.

Ampaire’s goal is to solve aviation’s biggest problems; high operating costs, sub-optimal routing, noise pollution, and harmful emissions. The company’s approach to electrification focuses on replacing common turboprop engines in 6- to 19-passenger airplanes with high efficiency electric powertrains. In 2019 Ampaire successfully demonstrated a hybrid-electric retrofit, the Electric EEL, and will be bringing the technology to Hawaii in 2020.

What makes them special?

Ampaire’s vision is to make air travel more accessible for more people by building electric aircrafts that are safe, clean, quiet, and less costly to operate. The company is integrating new technologies into an old industry to completely reshape the economics of air travel. Compared to carbon-based alternatives, the company’s electric aircraft enable airlines to reduce fuel costs by a factor of 10 and maintenance costs by a factor of two. And compared to other companies in the electric/hybrid-electric aircraft space, Ampaire is taking the lowest-risk, leanest, and most rigorous approach to bringing compelling products to market.

The solution.

Volatile electricity prices and a fragmented electric vehicle charging infrastructure are barriers to municipal and commercial fleet operators who want to go electric. Amply provides Charging-as-a-Service to derisk and accelerate the adoption of electric buses, trucks, and passenger vehicles by public and private fleets through its simple price-per-mile-driven model. Its software has demand and energy management, charge optimization, remote operations and maintenance, and automated reporting and billing built into it, meaning it can handle end-to-end (design to operations and maintenance) charging services and optimize charging for the lowest electricity costs.

About Bandwagon

Bandwagon is optimizing the taxi-hailing experience by turning taxi rides into shared rides – saving time, money, and gasoline. In urban centers around the world, taxis and other for-hire vehicles are organized around the transportation of individual passengers. Travelers have to pay the entire cost of the ride because there isn’t a way to utilize empty seats. Bandwagon sees this as an opportunity; the company resells empty seats and increases the efficiency of the taxi system.

Users text their destination to Bandwagon, who immediately starts looking for someone in the taxi line who is traveling the same way. Once they’ve found a passenger traveling along a similar route, Bandwagon sends both travelers a text. The travelers skip to the front of the line, where Bandwagon will guide you to your shared taxi. Then Bandwagon enables you to automatically split the fare with your fellow passenger, and texts passengers their receipts at the end of the trip. Shared rides result in less gasoline, air pollution, and congestion on busy airport-to-city routes.

Bandwagon started in New York City with deployments at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark airports, and is also available at Penn Station and Port Authority Bus Terminal. Bandwagon was a member of Elemental Excelerator’s 2014 Go-to-market Track.

About Bidgely

Bidgely (which means “electricity” in Hindi) was founded in 2011 in Mountain View, California by Abhay Gupta and Vivek Garud, who were connected by a vision of creating a low-cost technology that could achieve global impact. Bidgely works with utilities to 1) engage customers to reduce utility bills, and 2) provide system-wide benefits by reducing demand at critical times.

Bidgely’s software disaggregates energy usage to break down whole-house energy use into appliance-level insights, without any hardware or device-level sensors. Currently, Bidgely is working with utilities to serve more than two million customers across four continents.

Project Description

On Elemental Excelerator’s Demonstration Track, Bidgely is partnering with Hawaiian Electric and Blue Planet Foundation to test the company’s hypothesis that behavioral demand response is an effective way to shift peak energy usage. In 2016, 750 Hawaii residents received energy monitors (to provide data similar to a smart meter) coupled with access to Bidgely’s web and mobile applications, “HomeBeat”, that allows them to see real-time electricity use, receive personalized educational tips, and enable participation in the HECO Action Demand Response or ADR pilot. Through real-time feedback online and via mobile devices, Bidgely participants reduce their electric bill an average of 6%.

The solution.

Bikeshare Hawaii provides residents and visitors with a low-cost, convenient, zero-emissions transportation option that is healthy for users and the environment. Its program includes a network of 1,300 Biki bikes and 130 stations throughout Honolulu. Launched in June 2017, the program is one of the country’s most successful bike share programs with over 100,000 trips each month. 

Donnel Baird, founder and CEO of BlocPower, grew up in a financially underserved community. Because the heating system in his family’s one bedroom apartment rarely worked, his parents would open the kitchen stove to provide heat, and open a window to release the carbon monoxide. Anecdotes like this reflect patterns of energy neglect and waste in inner-city buildings across America.

As the national project director for a Green Jobs coalition that partnered and consulted with the U.S. Department of Energy during the Obama Administration, Donnel witnessed firsthand the difficulties that came with financing energy efficiency projects. These challenges are due mostly to the high costs of engineering and financial analyses on a building-by-building basis, and lack of available capital.

The solution.

BlocPower’s mission is to analyze, finance, and install energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies in buildings in low-income communities. Working closely with community leaders and institutions, BlocPower gathers 4 or more small- and medium-sized enterprises (such as non-profits, houses of worship, schools, and multi-family residences) in financially underserved communities into a “Bloc.” These “Blocs” reduce risks, create pricing discounts, and increase transactional size — improving the economic feasibility of projects.

BlocPower’s web interface allows users to input temperature, pressure, humidity, and utility data from each building and recommends financing and smart or renewable energy system upgrades for old, inefficient energy systems. Their cloud-based machine learning platform also connects to thermostats and building control systems to analyze optimal performance in real-time.

This service is not only valuable to building owners (who can decrease their energy costs by 20% to 50%), but also to utilities who need retrofits to reduce energy demand in hard to reach parts of their grids. It also helps government and city officials looking to reduce emissions (initial results show 2-3% reduction in GHG emissions) and reach their renewable energy goals.

What makes them special?

BlocPower focuses entirely on financially underserved communities. They are helping low-income communities access the social, environmental, and financial impact of greening their buildings.

The solution.

Cows emit so much methane when they digest grass and other feed that one year’s worth of burps from a productive dairy cow equals the annual tailpipe emissions from one car. Blue Ocean Barns sources, processes, markets and certifies a seaweed-based additive that, when added to a cow’s diet, stops the formation of methane and dramatically reduces emissions. The red seaweed is processed and dried using a proprietary protocol and sold to livestock producers, such as dairy and beef farmers. Fun fact: The same seaweed is a staple in Hawaii poke bowls!

About Blue Pillar

Blue Pillar connects Energy Things™ that power our world and makes that information available to people in real time. Their platform connects both legacy and new energy devices across single and multi-site facilities.

Blue Pillar inventories equipment and connects almost any kind of energy device from almost any manufacturer -including generators, smart meters, PV systems, energy storage, appliances, HVAC control systems – and combines them all into one centralized, easy-to-use energy management system. This connectivity strengthens critical infrastructure against power outages and other disruptions while helping businesses become more operationally productive and energy efficient.

Government organizations, universities, or businesses with multiple campuses can use Blue Pillar to see and manage all of their facilities in one place, instantaneously.

Blue Pillar has raised multiple rounds of institutional capital and has offices in Maryland, Switzerland, and Indiana – where the company was originally founded. In 2016, Blue Pillar won the Grid Edge Award from Platts Global Energy Awards.

Project Description

As a member of Elemental Excelerator’s 2015 Demonstration Track, Blue Pillar is piloting their energy management application with the University of Hawaii, as well as another government facility with multiple distributed energy resources. Blue Pillar is using their system to connect multiple building management systems and smart meters at the University of Hawaii and providing facilities managers real-time visibility into the performance of these buildings – and the ability to proactively manage them – for the first time. Blue Pillar is also deploying its microgrid controller and evaluating sites’ load profiles to determine the economic feasibility of adding energy storage.

Tetris entrepreneur Henk Rogers is on a mission to build energy solutions to become a planet powered by 100% renewables. He launched Blue Planet Energy in Hawai’i to achieve this mission, and today Blue Planet Energy’s Grid Optional™ Energy Solutions are engineered and built in the U.S. and deployed around the world for energy resilience projects.

The solution.

Blue Planet Energy’s premium energy storage solutions integrate a wide range of energy sources to power homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure independent of, or in conjunction with, the utility grid. The systems are differentiated by their reliability, safety, and ability to deliver full energy independence to homes and businesses where energy is absolutely critical or prohibitively high-cost.

• • Their residential solution features safe, non-toxic and conflict-free batteries, a 15-year performance warranty with zero maintenance requirements, and the ability to integrate multiple energy generation sources, such as renewables, generators, and the grid.
  • Their commercial solution integrates the same safe battery energy storage with the system intelligence and site controls needed to function with or without the utility grid. This battery features a ruggedized enclosure built in the U.S., a 21-year life expectancy (8,000 cycles at 100% Depth of Discharge), and is fully scalable to 2+ MWh.

What makes them special?

Blue Planet Energy’s technology also has applications aligned with mission-driven organizations to create long-term solutions for community resilience, recovery aid, and disaster relief projects, while also creating “green jobs” in the communities where they are active. Specific applications of their solutions installed in North and Central America include emergency services and healthcare facilities, agriculture, business continuity, microgrids, and backup power.

In early 2014, CEO Mark Pittman found himself frustrated at an unchanging traffic light. Mark called his old friend, and current CTO, Patrick Brown to build a better sensor – a sensor that could do more than just time traffic lights. The company has since grown to nine full-time employees gathering and analyzing data for cities, counties, Departments of Transportation, and private shopping centers.

The solution.

Blyncsy is a movement data intelligence company. What does that mean? Blync Sensors anonymously capture electronic signals, such as bluetooth and wifi from phones, cars, and smartwatches. Their Pulse analytics platform then aggregates, analyzes, and interprets the data, giving customers a clearer understanding of how people and traffic are moving through an environment.

Now let’s talk deployment.

Many transportation agencies utilize several different sources of data and several systems to manage that data. Pulse can incorporate other data sources in tandem with the Blync Sensor data, analyze it, and push data out in one simple platform. Customers receive analyses on travel times, delays, trip volumes, and more, in one simple, easy to use platform.

Blyncsy plans to partner with a transportation agency to deploy Blync Sensors and integrate the agency’s existing data sets into the Pulse analytics platform. Decision-makers and city planners will have the tools they need to direct the future of the transportation grid and Smart Cities work.

About Bright Light Systems

Bright Light Systems manufactures advanced lighting technology delivering up to 80% energy savings for high-mast lighting. High-mast lighting is for lights on poles that are generally over 90 feet tall, and are used to illuminate ports and shipping terminals, rail yards, manufacturing facilities, roads, and other infrastructure. Bright Light Systems’ luminaries use Light Emitting Plasma technology; a compact, electrode-less light source that delivers a 50% energy reduction over conventional lighting and offers a lamp lifetime of over 50,000 hours for high mast lighting applications. They couple their hardware solution with a cloud-based lighting management, monitoring, and reporting interface that achieves an additional 30% energy savings through intelligent control and scheduled dimming of the lights.

Bright Light Systems designs and manufactures its products in the U.S. and is headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, which is about 30 miles north of Atlanta.

Project Description

For its project on Elemental Excelerator’s Demonstration Track, Bright Light Systems deployed 350 energy-efficient luminaires with integrated controls, three Gateway communications devices, and the smart digital management system in partnership with the Port of Melbourne at the Victoria International Container Terminal in Australia. In total, the project achieved a 69.5% energy reduction and resulted in almost $100k in energy cost savings per year compared to the port’s previous lighting system. The Port of Melbourne project was one of Elemental Excelerator’s first international projects.

Update: BrightBox was acquired by NEXTracker in 2016. NEXTracker builds, manufactures, and designs single axis trackers for solar power plants and plans to integrate BrightBox’s predictive modeling software into their current software stack for performance optimization.

Read more: BrightBox Gets Acquired! What Does This Means for Energy Startups?

About BrightBox Technologies

BrightBox Technologies was founded in Berkeley, California to create optimization software that could take many data streams and inputs and continuously improve performance. The company’s first market was improving the operational efficiency of building HVAC systems.

Buoy was founded in 2015 when drought-stricken districts across California rapidly increased the cost of water to encourage conservation, but left homeowners with no way to manage their water use in real-time. Buoy is the third startup Keri Waters and Joel Boutros have co-founded, this time joined by Hilary Bryant, former mayor of Santa Cruz.

The solution.

Buoy’s first product is a complete smart home device for managing and understanding household water usage. Their easy-to-install device attaches to a home’s water line, and proprietary machine learning algorithms deliver appliance-level data on water use in real-time, providing homeowners and renters insight into how much water they use for irrigation, toilets, showers, and more.

What makes them special?

Buoy’s water usage data is comprehensive in breadth and depth. Their machine-learning algorithms have processed years of data, making their disaggregation both faster and more accurate than other, simpler water-sensing devices. The team has extensive experience in hardware, software, and policy – and CEO Keri Waters is a repeat founder who successfully sold her previous company, Arqetype, in 2014.

About Carbon Lighthouse

Brenden Millstein and Rafael Rosen have been best friends since age five. First playmates, then lab partners, and now co-founders, they started Carbon Lighthouse in 2010 in order to reduce carbon emissions from buildings. The company has since grown to over 30 employees, servicing 450+ buildings and eliminating the carbon emissions equivalent to three power plants.

Carbon Lighthouse has developed a software platform and installation method to deliver energy savings 10x more cost-effectively than traditional methods. The heart of the Carbon Lighthouse system is a network of low-cost sensors that are deployed throughout a commercial or industrial building’s mechanical rooms and roof. Using sensor data in real time, they can optimize existing equipment, leading to 20-30% whole building energy savings. In addition, Carbon Lighthouse has a business model that allows them to resolve the landlord-tenant split incentive, making the economics work for both building owners and renters, and enabling the company to work in buildings of any lease type.

Project Description

Carbon Lighthouse focused on two main objectives for their Elemental Excelerator project on the Demonstration Track: 1) create their own sensor instead of buying from a third party, and 2) enhance their machine learning algorithms to reduce the time it takes to analyze a building. By focusing on these two challenges, Carbon Lighthouse is now able to deploy their own network of sensors, averaging 1,000x more data than other firms are able to collect, and giving them the ability to guarantee, for the first time, 20-30% whole-building energy reductions.

CarbonCure was founded in 2007 by Rob Niven. Rob had recently graduated with a Masters in Environmental Engineering from McGill University, where he studied the benefits of introducing CO2 to fresh concrete. That year, Rob attended a United Nations summit on Climate Change, where he saw a global demand for solutions to reduce carbon emissions.

Inspired by the summit, Rob thought to himself, “The scientific community understands that CO2 can be chemically converted to a mineral within concrete. So why can’t we find a way to use CO2 in every-day concrete, and help concrete producers respond to the demand for green building products?”

The solution.

CarbonCure is the world leader in CO2 utilization technologies for the cement and concrete sector. Its retrofit technology chemically mineralizes waste carbon dioxide during the concrete production process, making greener and stronger concrete. The CarbonCure Technology is being used by over 130 concrete producers today to reduce concrete’s carbon footprint, create new production cost savings and gain a competitive sales advantage.

What makes them special?

The CarbonCure Technology provides economic advantages to its customers while reducing carbon emissions — truly a win-win solution. The emerging industry of beneficial reuse of CO2 is expected to become a $1 trillion industry by the year 2030, according to The Global CO2 Initiative. CarbonCure’s portfolio of technologies has the potential to reduce up to 500 megatons of annual global CO2 emissions and create up to $26 billion in new production efficiencies.

About CareDaily

CareDaily (formerly known as People Power Company) enables AI subscription services that make it feel like someone is always helping care for a senior loved one. Their solution alerts on falls and wandering, monitors sleep, offers daily encouragement, and reduces energy waste.

Project Description

Prior to rebranding and focusing on senior care, People Power worked with Hawaii Energy and Hawaiian Electric to engage 740 Hawaii residents with their mobile application, Presence. Each home received energy-monitoring and controlling Monster plugs and access to the app, and participated in a 12-week “Energy Engagement Program” consisting of weekly challenges to save energy and earn rewards. Through the app, residents were able to see to their energy consumption data, set energy goals, and monitor their progress toward those goals. Residents with high energy use and high project engagement saw savings of up to 11% on their total energy use.

About Ceres Imaging

Ceres Imaging believes that the future of sustainable agriculture depends on putting precise, accurate, and actionable information in the hands of farmers. Using multispectral aerial imagery and data analytics, the company helps growers and farm advisors make proactive management decisions that build more profitable and more efficient operations. Applications include:

• Irrigation management: Minimizing waste and fine-tuning irrigation programs for the highest-quality crop
• Nutrient management: Improving plant health while reducing expenses on fertilizer and other inputs
• Pest and disease management: Monitoring crops to stop the spread of costly outbreaks
• Labor management: Helping teams prioritize and communicate more efficiently

Project Description

As part of Elemental Excelerator’s Demonstration Track, Ceres Imaging deployed their imaging-as-a-service beginning on Oahu, Hawaii Island, and Kauai with over 6,000 acres of coffee and macadamia nut trees, and other farms. The goal was to reduce water use and cost for the farms, contributing to the Hawaii Freshwater Initiative’s goal of reducing Hawaii’s freshwater use from 400 million gallons per day to 360 million gallons per day through water conservation measures.

Today, Ceres Imaging services specialty and commodity growers across the United States and Australia. The company works with more than 30 different crops, including tree nuts, grapes, cotton, potatoes, corn, soy, and hemp.

We all know that driving electric is great, but going beyond your range isn’t. Chargetrip’s co-founders had the same realization while driving around Europe. Beyond range anxiety, there are a ton of additional and dynamic variables that make switching to electric driving complex: plug-type, charging power, charge speed and time, payment systems, waiting times, temperature, weather, and topography. Chargetrip’s mission is to fix today’s charge- and drive-ecosystem to accelerate the transition to electric mobility.

The solution.

Chargetrip is a SaaS navigation API for the electric mobility market. Their routing algorithms, white-label driver applications, and predictive models seamlessly optimize travel and charging for time, cost, and personal preference. Over fifteen variables are taken into account, including the dynamic status of charge stations, topography, user preference, and vehicle profile. Additionally, Chargetrip’s technology stack can be easily integrated into existing charge, navigation, and telemetric applications.

What makes them special?

They already have significant traction with roughly 2% of the global EV stock on their platform and with Germany’s no.1  sports car manufacturer as one of their early adopters.

About ConnectDER

Whit founded ConnectDER to give inventors a place to solve meaningful problems and to ensure they have an ownership stake in the solutions they create. His mission is to create technologies and companies that unlock scalable models for clean energy. ConnectDER (pronounced “connector”) helps utilities see and monitor solar on their grid, and helps solar companies reduce the cost of installing PV. The ConnectDER is a UL-listed meter collar that goes between the meter and the home, turning the electric power meter socket on a home or building into a standardized interconnection point for solar PV and other distributed energy resources (DERs). The collar is a safe and low-cost alternative to the extensive electrical work usually required to install solar.

Currently, utilities do not have visibility into solar production on the electricity grid. Yet on the island of Oahu, during the middle of the day the combined power of distributed solar is effectively the island’s largest power plant. ConnectDER is able to provide the utility metering, visualization, and control, enabling utility operators and planners to manage assets and facilitate integration with the grid.

Project Description

ConnectDER is a member of Elemental Excelerator’s 2014 Demonstration Track. Through their project they are working with solar companies and Hawaiian Electric to deploy 65 of their devices on Oahu homes with PV systems: an aggregate installed capacity of over 400 kW of monitored and managed solar capacity.

Valery Miftakhov was raised in Siberia as the son of an oil-field engineer. While he was at McKinsey & Company, and later Google, the launch of Tesla and electric vehicles got him thinking about how electrons move through the power grid. This led to eMotorWerks, which sells fast, app-enabled EV chargers that tap into the grid at the most carbon-efficient time. Since its founding in 2012, the company has grown to over 45 employees. In October 2017, eMotorWerks was acquired by Enel.

The solution.

eMotorWerks’ EV chargers are the number one EV chargers on Amazon.com. But…that’s not their core product. Their secret sauce is their IoT platform for managing grid-integrated EV charging, called JuiceNet. The cloud-based platform matches the time and rate of EV charging to grid conditions. This matching enables EVs to participate in grid management services – such as demand response, frequency regulation, peak shaving, local load balancing, and many others. As a result, utilities and Independent Systems Operators (ISOs) are better able to manage grid volatility and fully leverage the rapidly growing adoption of EVs.

eMotorWerks’ vehicle-grid integration platform will control more than 2 GW of virtual power plant capacity by 2020 – built from the charging load of over 250,000 electric vehicles.

Now let’s talk deployment.

eMotorWerks plans to install JuiceNet-enabled charging stations in Hawaii. Their JuiceNet platform will dispatch and control charging across the fleet of chargers to help balance frequency and optimize grid efficiency, while also ensuring that EV owners’ needs are met. Additionally, eMotorWerks will provide highly granular submeter data from each charging station, enabling the utilities to better understand their customers’ charging activities, which could factor into new rate design and improving customer service.

The solution.

In Hawai‘i, like many places, there is significant demand for local food yet insufficient market access for small, local farmers. Farm Link Hawai‘i connects producers directly to buyers of all types — including chefs, grocery stores, caterers, and households — via an innovative online marketplace and supply-chain infrastructure. The all-inclusive software platform includes marketing, sales, billing, and logistics tools. Additionally, Farm Link Hawai‘i operates a decentralized cold storage network with refrigerated trucking and hubs that double as farmer drop point and customer pickup points.

Jacob Isaac-Lowry and Sarah Alessi founded FlyWire Cameras in 2014 with a vision to fuse the versatility of their patented, integrated video technologies with the limitless capacity of big data analytics to build economically viable vessel-based technologies.

The solution.

FlyWire is passionate about sustainability and bringing the benefits of technology to one of the world’s oldest, largest industries. Their technology captures and analyzes the critical data needed to maximize fishing quotas, manage bycatch, and keep fish stocks healthy for the next generation.

1. Their cameras offer the most comprehensive view of what actually happens on the water, with visual imagery, GPS position, and sensor data to verify more hauls in more places.
2. The AI-enabled software processes and analyzes data from each fishing trip to deliver actionable analytics to harvesters and suppliers.
3. Lastly, they aggregate electronic monitoring, logbooks, e-logbooks, and landing reports in order to provide seafood businesses with continuous insight into their operations and supply chain performance-all while ensuring that harvesters retain privacy rights to their sensitive information.

The solution.

FREDsense is simplifying the complex water analysis process with a platform for real-time, field-based water quality testing using biosensors. The company’s sensor platform uses electrochemical detection to detect chemical contaminants in a water sample. Water utilities can use FREDsense’s technology to rapidly identify chemicals such as lead and arsenic in their water systems, instead of having to go through the time-consuming and costly process of preparing and shipping water samples to a testing facility.

FreeWire Technologies provides electrification beyond the grid, enabling access to clean power wherever and whenever its needed.

FreeWire offers beautifully designed and easy to use solutions to power industries and applications formerly dependent on fossil fuels. FreeWire’s flexible mobile power and infrastructure-light electric vehicle charging solutions are comprehensive, combining products and services to optimize energy delivery and management. By providing world-class service alongside innovative products, FreeWire helps automotive OEM, corporate campuses, electric utilities, entertainment, and fleet operators easily deploy clean power and EV charging solutions anywhere, without the complexity and cost of fixed energy infrastructure.

The Solution.

FreeWire addresses the inherent challenges of EV charging infrastructure with the Mobi® EV Charger which can be quickly deployed to meet growing EV market demand with no additional fixed infrastructure. A mobile, battery-integrated alternative to the stationary L2 chargers, Mobi EV Chargers deliver high-quality power to wherever EVs are located. The Mobi Gen offers clean and quiet on-site power for facilities or remote sites that require a guaranteed source of power, that’s powerful enough for construction, emergency response and all backup power needs. The Boost Charger™ provides ultrafast battery-integrated EV charging with 120 kW output and no additional infrastructure upgrades. It delivers high-quality power while significantly reducing demand charges. All FreeWire products are backed by AMP™ mobile and desktop software platform for advanced energy management and analytics.

Powering Forward

Customers enjoying flexible mobile power and infrastructure-light EV charging now include Fortune 500 companies and utilities located across the U.S. and abroad. FreeWire has secured strategic investment from global market leaders including BP Ventures, Volvo Cars and Stanley Black and Decker for a successful $15 million Series A financing. The company is scaling production to meet growing demand.

Now, let’s talk deployment.

FreeWire is demonstrating their first Level 3 (fast-charging) EV charging robots at multiple locations throughout Hawaii, including the Airport Trade Center in Honolulu. This pilot couples their dynamic, second-life EV battery charging solution with an energy management platform that gives admins access to real-time data on the capacity of the units and charge status. FreeWire is exploring other ways to increase access to EV charging through their low-cost solution, particularly in multi-family housing and workplaces.

Full Cycle Bioplastics fights plastic pollution and climate change by transforming organic matter into a compostable alternative to oil-based plastics. The company was founded in 2014 and bootstrapped in a shed behind a peach processing facility in Fresno, CA. Once validated, the company secured a seed investment and a partnership with the USDA, and has subsequently been scaling its technology and customer base.

The solution.

Full Cycle’s proprietary technology converts mixed organic waste — such as inedible food waste, agricultural by-products, and un-recyclable paper — into cost-competitive, compostable biopolymers called polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). PHAs are made naturally by bacteria, degrade harmlessly at end of life, and are versatile alternatives to many oil-based plastics.

Full Cycle technology makes organic waste management and recycling profitable. With Full Cycle technology, managers of organic waste streams like waste processing facilities, municipalities, and food and beverage companies, can manufacture a high-value and sustainable product in the form of PHA resins that can be used in a range of compostable products and packaging applications. At end of life, PHA-based products can be recycled as part of a regenerative organics recycling loop, effectively closing the loop and linking waste and materials markets.

What makes them special?

Full Cycle has the unique ability to take a wide array of non-homogenous feedstocks and produce consistent, custom polymers at a cost that is competitive with oil-based alternatives.

Full Cycle’s business model is unique as well.  The technology scales down effectively, enabling regional deployment and demonstration of economically viable solutions that are less capital intensive than many alternative waste conversion technologies.  Licensing also allows rapid technology adoption by leveraging the financial strength of licensees and project finance partners, rather than relying on the organic growth of owner-operator, self-financed facilities.

The Solution.

Geli has created the energy industry’s first platform for the rapid design, deployment, and management of intelligent energy storage assets. Geli provides software and services to enable industry participants – from utilities to electricians – to understand the value of distributed energy storage and to deploy a solution that best fits their customer’s needs. Founded in 2010, Geli’s software has enabled the deployment of a variety of systems around the world.

Geli’s software suite is comprised of three tools: 1) Geli ESyst is an online project design tool that incorporates components from different OEMs as well as opportunities for project finance to quickly determine whether a site makes sense for energy storage; 2) the Geli Energy Operating System (Geli EOS) automates energy storage systems, dynamically importing protocols from Geli ESyst analysis as projects move forward; and 3) the Geli GENI platform monitors energy storage operations, reports operational and financial performance, and aggregates fleets of systems to provide grid services.

Now let’s talk deployment.

Geli is working with Hawaii PV developers to customize their ESyst platform to fit the regulatory environment. They currently have 20+ Hawaii installers working on ESyst, modeling and right-sizing solar-plus-storage systems in order to provide solar and storage to more markets at lower cost. Hawaii has one of the highest levels of PV in the nation, with nearly 30% of single family homes having installed solar, so new systems on multi-family housing and other locations often require storage in order to connect to the grid.

Lisa Laughner made the leap from Rolls Royce’s venture team to a startup to work with a technology and team she believed in. Alex and Tony, two former colleagues, had made some important progress on a microgrid technology they were working on, and wanted someone who knew business to help them scale it.

About Go Electric

Go Electric enables facilities to balance multiple energy inputs seamlessly, and enables the facilities to operate either on the grid or as an islanded microgrid – all with seamless power delivery to critical equipment and no power interruptions. The hardware is an uninterruptible power system (UPS) on steroids, ensuring that facilities have backup power even if the grid goes down. The company’s secret sauce is the way it combines top-of-line hardware with software that can manage multiple energy sources, such as generators, PV, load, and batteries – providing a secure solution for critical facilities.

Go Electric also enables utilities to access the facility’s reserve power for use on the grid when the need arises. This means that facility owners can generate additional revenue from their UPS because the utility pays the facility for the right to curtail their energy use through demand response tariffs or similar programs.

It’s a win-win of more security and more revenue for the facility. The projects also present a win for the utility, which can tap the GoElectric equipment to deliver grid services.

Project Description

Go Electric’s microgrid has found success in military applications – particularly a 3 MW microgrid in Hawaii as part of the Department of Defense’s SPIDERS program. In Elemental Excelerator’s 2015 Go-to-market Track, Lisa and Go Electric developed the commercial business model in order to further scale the solution. The company developed significant commercial traction and was selected for the 2017 Demonstration Track to implement a commercial project on the Big Island of Hawaii and demonstrate its scalable business model.

The solution.

Goodr believes that hunger isn’t a scarcity issue, it’s a logistics issue. Powered by blockchain technology, Goodr provides a secure ledger that tracks an organization’s surplus food waste from pickup to donation, delivering the competitive advantage of real-time social impact reporting analytics. The Goodr model aims to provide a triple-win solution by improving an organization’s bottom line through charitable tax donations, reducing its greenhouse emissions from landfills and getting its edible surplus food to local communities in need.

The solution.

GrubTubs supports local farmers and sustainable cities by transforming food waste into nutrient-rich animal feed. By diverting waste from landfills and improving business economics for small farmers, GrubTubs creates synchronicity between our food, energy, and waste cycles.

For restaurants and grocery stores, GrubTubs’ food waste collection service is an inexpensive alternative to composting and reduces trash bills. For livestock farmers, feed is the single largest operating expense, accounting for approximately 60-70% of total costs. GrubTubs provides an affordable alternative. The company was initially founded in Hawaii in close collaboration with University of Hawaii, and is now working in Texas for its next stages of growth..

What makes them special?

In the United States, restaurants and grocery stores produce over 25 million tons of food waste annually – of which over 95% goes directly into landfills. The market potential on the collection of this food waste exceeds $1.1 billion in the cities and states with approved food waste bans alone.

Beyond the economic implications, animal feed accounts for nearly 70% of the farm acreage in the United States. As the country continues to face food security and access issues and small farmers struggle to compete with multinational farming companies, GrubTubs will be part of the solution.

About Heliogen

Heliogen is a clean energy company focused on eliminating the need for fossil fuels in all sectors of the economy. Heliogen’s mission is to create the world’s first technology that can commercially replace fossil fuels in industrial processes with carbon-free, ultra-high temperature heat from the sun and to transform sunlight into fuels, including hydrogen, at scale. Heliogen was created at Idealab, the leading technology incubator in the world.

Project Description

Heliogen’s commercial facility is located in Lancaster, CA and currently producing carbon-free, ultra-high temperature heat. With temperatures from its concentrating solar thermal technology exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius, Heliogen will be able to replace the fuel that generates greenhouse gas emissions from industrial processes with solar energy for the first time.

In addition to industrial process heat, Heliogen’s technology roadmap calls for temperatures up to 1,500 degrees Celsius. At that temperature, Heliogen can perform CO2-splitting and water-splitting to make 100 percent fossil-free fuels such as hydrogen or syngas.

About HST

HST helps buyers and sellers find each other and drive more clean energy to our grids. With more buyers interested in clean energy from large scale projects, more developers show up to sell energy. And vice versa.

How does it work? HST’s platform is built for both developers and buyers. It brings artificial intelligence and computational firepower to clean energy, allowing developers to assess up to 180 billion potential project designs on land plots and analyze site feasibility, optimization, and energy marketing. The platform also covers renewables sourcing, procurement, and tracking for buyers.

As of 2020, HST has a presence in Northern and Southern California, and has traction in 100 countries across 6 continents.

Imprint Energy was founded in 2010 with the goal of designing an inherently safe, non-toxic, solid-state battery technology. The California startup’s core technology was based on CEO and Co-Founder Christine Ho’s doctoral work at UC Berkeley.

The solution.

Imprint Energy has developed a safe, rechargeable zinc battery well-suited to power the next generation of electronics, including billions of IoT devices, sensors, and wearables. Their ZincPoly™ chemistry and low-cost, highly scalable printing process produce ultra-thin, flexible, and customizable batteries. Imprint’s batteries are as thin as two sheets of paper and have a higher power density than other alternatives.

What makes them special?

Standard commercial printers can be used to produce Imprint’s batteries, enabling contract manufacturers and others to design and produce custom, ultra-thin batteries for next-generation devices. Moreover, the batteries can be “co-manufactured” with sensors, circuitry, and antennas, providing a new way to manufacture integrated devices that is more environmentally friendly and low cost. Imprint is in early commercialization and is already printing and shipping large volumes for market pilots.

About in2lytics

In2lytics spun out of Referentia, a Honolulu-based technology company, in 2015. Referentia developed the technology with significant input from utilities from 2009-2015 before launching the product for commercialization. In2lytics now works with utilities to aggregate data from its different systems and sensors to enable utility operators, planners, and the public to visualize information in easy-to-use formats.

In2lytics has deployed its solution with three Hawaii utilities, and is providing a database platform that integrates disparate data from distributed resources. In2lytics combines SCADA, AMI, irradiance, PV, Wind, and other data to provide new insights into electricity grid operations. Reports that used to take weeks for one or two specialists to run can now be completed by any team member with access in just minutes. For the first time, utilities have a visual interface to access the very large amounts of data coming off the electricity grid. The knowledge gained from grid data is critical for renewable energy planning. It provides the insight needed to increase system availability while reducing operational expenditures. In2lytics also has a lightweight data management process that stores and organizes data in 10% the amount of space usually needed, reducing costs significantly. At the same time, aspects of this data have been made public for the first time, in particular powering Hawaiian Electric’s Renewable Watch website. That work was actually made possible by work the Elemental Excelerator team did in 2010 with Referentia, before the creation of In2lytics.

Project Description

As part of Elemental Excelerator’s 2017 Demonstration Track, In2lytics is deploying a suite of applications for rural electric co-ops and distribution system operators based on their proven database platform technology. The dashboard applications are focused on delivering actionable information to reduce costs, improve system resiliency, and enhance customer satisfaction. Their solution has already been demonstrated alongside three utilities and the Marine Corps base in Hawaii.

The solution.

Risk modeling that has historically informed design and planning throughout the world is based on the flawed assumption that the climate is not changing. With a platform specifically designed for climate impact analysis, Jupiter Intelligence helps businesses and property owners predict and manage the physical risks of climate change to their assets. Its platform models climate hazards that directly impact businesses — such as flooding, extreme heat, wind gusts, wildfires, and more — and provides high-resolution risk data for analysis at the individual property level.

The solution.

Challenges faced by the wastewater industry exist mainly due to the inability to attain a real-time overview of wastewater networks throughout the upstream network of piping and waste generators. Kando’s end-to-end hardware and software integrated solution, Clear Upstream, uses IoT sensors and monitoring technology to create continuous situational awareness of events in wastewater networks. By visualizing, analyzing, predicting and pinpointing upstream network behavior, this technology can reduce pollution events that overburden treatment centers, damage infrastructure, and create health hazards to the community.

The solution.

Kevala’s goal is to make clean energy-related data meaningful, transparent, and broadly accessible. Kevala finds and analyzes the locational value of solar, storage, and other energy resources while simultaneously quantifying the environmental, social, and economic impact of policies and program. This modeling and analysis tool accelerates smart investments and deployments of energy assets on the grid by allowing developers and investors to see where assets are worth the most.

What makes them special?

Kevala maps a community’s grid by combining cutting edge machine learning algorithms and crowdsourcing data from energy stakeholders. Local participants and decision makers then use Kevala’s analytical engine to facilitate the integration of clean electricity while balancing grid needs. How will adding 10 EV Level 2 charging stations affect a circuit? Ask Kevala.

Now let’s talk deployment.

Kevala is building out their Network Assessor platform, which enables users to view the value of solar at a specific location. They are enhance Network Assessor with new assessments and features including : 1) DER hosting capacity; 2) locational net benefit analysis; 3) scenario modeling and output comparisons; and 4) energy efficiency assessments. Network Assessor can remove regulatory uncertainty for DER providers and consumers by revealing the key considerations impacting DER market design. The goal is to create a foundation for improved decision making by utilities and regulators. Once policy is adopted, Network Assessor can be used to track program progress and make adjustments, thereby accelerating the feedback loop between the “market” and the market designers.

The solution.

KIGT helps organizations and individuals support the transition to vehicle electrification by reaping the benefits of low-cost electric vehicle charging. The company is an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and software developer for EV smart charging stations. They have an easy-to-use mobile app, intuitive user interface, and seamless billing with back-end grid management for property owners and utilities. KIGT designs projects that focus on empowering communities with new revenue sources, proactive climate resiliency strategies, technical skills, and employment opportunities that all normalize and promote EV driving, particularly in low- to moderate-income communities.

Rich Matsui spent years in the solar industry, first working with McKinsey & Co. and then with his own consulting firm Honua Solutions. He founded kWh Analytics in 2012 to build the industry-wide data repository of how solar energy assets actually perform in the field.

The Solution.

kWh Analytics now aggregates data from 20% of all American solar power plants by selling risk management software that is used by major financial investors in solar assets, such as US Bank, PNC Bank, and Google. kWh Analytics used this data to invent the “Solar Revenue Put”, an insurance product backed by Swiss Re that reduces solar financing costs by guaranteeing energy production. kWh sold the first Revenue Put in Dec ’17, insuring $60m of solar farms owned by Panasonic.

Now let’s talk deployment.

kWh Analytics was a part of Elemental Excelerator’s 2013 Go-to-market Track and developed a business model around their solar data sets. As a member of the 2015 Demonstration cohort, kWh Analytics is working with the State of Hawaii’s Department of Business Economic Development and Tourism and the Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority’s Green Energy Market Securitization (GEMS) program to screen PV systems and providers for quality and identify the highest quality projects for financing. The GEMS program is designed to make solar financing available to hard-to-reach populations, especially lower income residents and non-profit organizations that cannot access traditional financing. kWh Analytics can not only serve as the data wizard for this new solar portfolio, but also assist in fulfilling reporting requirements and measuring portfolio performance.

Karl Holmqvist (CEO) is a serial entrepreneur with a keen interest in telco infrastructure and internet security systems. Prior to founding Lastwall, Karl built a telecommunications carrier in Canada and worked in Dubai as an investor with AGT. Thomas (President) is a serial entrepreneur, and most recently he was responsible for driving Oracle’s security strategy. Prior to that he was the founder of Bharosa, a global security platform provider which was acquired by Oracle in 2007.

About LastWall

LastWall grew out of their combined experience and provides security for remote users by bringing real-time fraud and risk analysis to the cloud. The technology ensures that users are who they say they are by using authentication beyond the name and password, such as device use patterns and other learned pattern recognition. This helps companies stop cyber-crime by uniquely identifying each user based on their access patterns and only allowing the real user to log into the system. LastWall’s approach allows companies such as banks and utilities to deploy an extra layer of security to protect their users faster and more cost effectively than other products in the market today. From the end-user’s perspective, Lastwall’s platform is effectively invisible 99% of the time, only sending an alert when there is a risk present. This zero-friction approach makes for a better user experience, without the hassle of downloading an app or changing a behavior.

In Elemental Excelerator’s Go-to-market Track, LastWall has been working on applying their security technology to utilities and other participants in the energy market. LastWall has offices in Vancouver, British Columbia and Mountain View, California.

The solution.

Leap allows every connected device to help balance the grid, and get paid for it. The company democratizes the demand-side of the grid by enabling a broad mix of residential and commercial distributed energy resources (DERs) to participate in the wholesale energy markets. A single API aggregates different load profiles and types into larger blocks, redefining the value of small resources while helping build the flexible, renewable grid of the future. Through the platform, demand-side resources can price their flexibility in the wholesale market and get paid for making the grid cleaner and more reliable. 

The solution.

Liminal (formerly known as Feasible) addresses major challenges in how we understand batteries at scale. The company’s platform helps battery producers lower the cost of cell production, improve battery quality and performance, and eventually enable battery reuse as a cost-effective solution for stationary storage. The technology diagnoses battery health by sending ultrasonic pulses into battery cells and analyzing response vibrations that indicate cell condition and can help to improve production decisions. 

Biology is the most ancient and powerful technology that we know of, yet the way that biology has been applied to industrial processes has changed little in the past 100 years. Fatemeh Shirazi, founder of Microvi, observed that microorganisms in the natural world behave and function very differently than those in the concrete basins and steel tanks that run our industrial bioprocesses. In her journey to find out why, Fatemeh created a novel platform to recreate features of the microenvironments of organisms in nature – the foundation for Microvi.

The solution.

Microvi creates tailored biocatalytic solutions to address global challenges in water, energy, and the environment. Their MicroNiche Engineering (MNE) platform combines materials science and microbiology, aligning modern industrial bioprocesses with how microorganisms evolved to function over billions of years. Microvi has developed thousands of biocatalyst composites (combinations of microorganisms and specific materials) as the base of its suite of water purification, wastewater treatment, and renewable chemical production technologies. One of the company’s most advanced technologies, Denitrovi, removes the common pollutant nitrate from drinking water by completely degrading it into harmless nitrogen gas with no biosolids production.

What makes them special?

Microvi is the first and only company to focus exclusively on the microenvironment to enhance how microorganisms perform in industrial bioprocesses. Existing biological water treatment technologies produce significant sludge and require extensive energy, making them uneconomical, unscalable, and ineffective. Microvi’s Denitrovi technology — a drop-in, low-cost solution that does not produce secondary waste and requires little energy — is an economical option for the hundreds of low-income communities in California that have high levels of nitrate in their drinking water. In fact, the EPA estimates that billions of gallons of water are unusable due to nitrate contamination in California alone. Microvi’s goal in partnership with Elemental Excelerator is to develop standardized, standalone units that can be easily integrated as nitrate treatment systems.

The solution.

Nexus (formerly EthosGen) has pioneered the utilization of advanced materials to transform the nearly 60% of energy that is currently wasted into cost-effective and carbon-free electricity and cooling. Using their patented and proprietary Sorption-Energy system and advanced materials developed in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, Nexus captures waste heat from a wide array of commercial and industrial processes (including manufacturing processes, geothermal, and waste/biomass) and converts it into electrical power and cooling (HVAC, refrigeration, etc).

What makes them special?

Nexus makes categorical leaps in the efficiency and economics of utilizing low-grade waste heat. In addition, it improves rather than replaces existing systems, providing energy resiliency with on-site electric production and cooling capabilities at or below current commercial costs.

Ramon and Joan Miquel have been working together in the energy industry for more than a decade. In 2013, they recognized the potential of applying machine learning and analytics to combine weather and other data from the energy industry and founded Nnergix.

The solution.

Nnergix is a weather analytics and energy forecasting service that helps utilities, independent power providers, energy traders, asset managers, and T&D system operators understand how weather is affecting their assets in order to correctly operate and protect them.

Nnergix products are divided into three main areas:

• The SENTINEL – Solar platform helps automate a company’s residential and industrial portfolio by providing visibility behind the meter (without hardware), energy forecasting, performance ratio optimization, and other management tools.
• The SENTINEL – Grid Resilience platform protects assets from severe weather events and automates the audit process after an incident or failure.
• The SMARTmonitor service provides sub-hourly solar, wind, and hydro energy production forecasts. The portal has a number of applications including increased accuracy for predicting future generation and lowering costs of operations and maintenance.

Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao co-founded Novoloop in 2015 while on a mission to become the most transformational materials company by showing the world what can be done with plastic waste.

The solution.

Novoloop developed a breakthrough Accelerated Thermal Oxidative Decomposition (ATOD™) technology, which harvests plastic waste as a carbon-rich feedstock and stores them as performance materials with virgin qualities.

What makes them special?

Novoloop’s recycled materials are environmentally friendly and have the same high-performance properties as virgin materials. They contain up to 50% post-consumer recycled content while reducing up to 45% carbon emissions, offering meaningful sustainability—without sacrificing quality—to both consumers and brands.

The solution.

Numina makes cities responsive with powerful real-time insights for city planners, mobility companies, real-estate developers, and technologists. In planning for the safety, health, and equity of their communities, cities are often limited to stale, inaccurate data. Numina provides data about what’s happening at street-level and delivers privacy-first analytics on the behaviors of pedestrians, bicycles, vehicles, wheelchairs, dogs, bags of trash — you-name-it. The data is created by proprietary computer vision-based sensors and anonymized for safety and security. By making this intelligence available and digestible in real-time, Numina makes streets queryable and turns the city into a developer platform.

The solution.

OhmConnect is a residential demand response software platform that gamifies saving electricity. The company makes it possible for customers to use clean energy without buying an expensive solar system or changing to a different energy provider from their common regional utility service, by paying users for saving energy when the grid is at risk of using dirty power. Their customer engagement platform is backed up with state-of-science engineering acumen, innovative social marketing, key partnerships, and regulatory expertise to create and capture value in energy markets.

Today, OhmConnect enables hundreds of thousands of customers to reimagine how they use energy, to choose clean-energy over dirty-energy when required, and to be rewarded for timely, smarter, home energy use. Customers of the three major California energy suppliers – Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric – can sign up with OhmConnect for free at ohmconnect.com.

Joshua Wong was inspired by his experience pioneering the smart grid department at Toronto Hydro. He dealt first hand with the challenge of integrating an increasing number of customer-sited distributed energy resources (DER) for the largest municipal electricity distribution company in Canada. With an understanding that any change in the distribution system has to start with grid visibility and situational awareness, Joshua set out to build Opus One alongside two other energy industry veterans.

The solution.

Opus One enables the distributed energy grid with a dynamic software platform that gives utilities, owners of distributed energy resources (DERs), and other market participants visibility into the DNA of the electricity distribution grid in real-time. GridOS is the leading software solution for real-time, model-based, 3-phase AC unbalanced decision making for DERs (e.g., solar PV, battery storage, EVs, fuel cells, and responsive demand) on the distribution network. They provide utilities with a number of application suites from integrated planning, through operational management to transactional intelligence in support of new business models and markets. These applications leverage GridOS core technologies that include full situational awareness of the distribution network, optimization engines for dynamic hosting capacity, Volt/VAR support, and DER dispatch. The result enables increased DER hosting capacity, improved reliability and grid resiliency.

What makes them special?

Most importantly, Opus One’s software enables utilities to optimize distribution systems and to handle grid constraints or unexpected events. They are helping more than 12 utilities, including two of the largest investor-owned utilities in the U.S., to strengthen the resiliency of their grids by deploying planning and operational technology solutions for the distribution grid. GridOS is flexible, all of the core applications run on the same platform that share data and services and have an open API to integrate with third party applications.

Now let’s talk deployment.

Opus One plans to deploy their GridOS solution on several high penetration DER substations. The utility will be able to 1) optimize DERs during real-time system operations, 2) determine the dynamic hosting capacity for the substations and feeders, 3) leverage the wealth of data to information for infrastructure planning, and 4) leverage the data to develop future business models built around transactive energy.

Christine Su and George Lee left corporate jobs to pursue a shared vision of helping farmers build a better food system. They launched PastureMap in 2016 to help ranchers make profits building a carbon-friendly meat supply chains.

The Solution.

PastureMap is connecting data through the supply chain to achieve a triple bottom line: 1) traceable, healthy beef that’s better for consumers, 2) profitable rancher and farmer livelihoods, and 3) building soil carbon and healthy grasslands. Their mobile and cloud platform helps ranchers combine grazing records with soil and rainfall analytics to increase productivity per acre and protect valuable carbon stores. Grasslands comprise one-third of our global landmass and managed grazing could offset 16 gigatons of CO2 by 2050.

What makes them special?

Keeping a digital trail certifies the authenticity of carbon-friendly beef and can enable ranchers and producers to recapture profits from the supply chain. PastureMap is building an animal performance database, from grazing, health history, to their final slaughter quality, which will help the entire ranching community raise better cattle on healthier grasslands.

About PlotWatt

Nearly 10 years ago PlotWatt’s founder and CEO Luke Fishback found himself baffled by his electric bill…and he’s a rocket scientist. That frustration led to a simple question: “What if I could demand more of the energy data I produce?”

His answer was PlotWatt, a team of mathematicians, scientists and software developers who write software and create algorithms to take data from smart meters and translate it into energy savings for multi-location business customers. PlotWatt’s analysts take this data and uncover the energy-saving opportunities that offer the biggest return. PlotWatt specializes in delivering customized action plans that drive persistent, intelligent efficiency that leverages the existing resources of its customers.

PlotWatt works with multi-location businesses in the retail, telecom, healthcare, banking, grocery, and restaurant sectors. With its proprietary mix of software, actionable recommendations, and custom consulting, PlotWatt helps these customers drive operational efficiencies and save an average of 6% on their annual energy expenditures.

In 2018, PlotWatt was acquired by American Efficient, an aggregators of energy efficiency resources.

Scott Cooney, a serial entrepreneur who has started and run multiple green and media businesses, started Pono Home in 2013 to make sustainability and healthy living simpler and more accessible for people. The company is named for the Hawaiian word “pono,” which means goodness or righteousness. Pono Home was founded in Hawaii and is now growing its business and team across the U.S.

The Solution.

Pono Home offers residents and businesses a comprehensive energy and sustainability audit combined with the installation of more efficient devices, all in one visit. Some of the common upgrades include high-efficiency shower and other water fixtures, LED lighting, advanced power strips, and other devices. The company also does basic home maintenance to clean refrigerator coils, dryer vents, and check major appliances and the building envelope. The company also offers a carcinogenic ingredient sweep of personal care products. To date, they have greened more than 6,000 homes and replaced more than 40,000 inefficient fixtures with high-efficiency ones.

What makes them special?

Pono Home is able to make the service convenient and affordable by doing the audit and efficiency work during the same visit, eliminating the need for a second visit and follow-up work. Customer results include a healthier, more comfortable home, along with reduced energy and water bills. The average payback period for the upgrades made by Pono Home is less than 12 months for the company’s Hawaii customers. In 2018, they became a Certified B Corporation.

Now let’s talk deployment.

Pono Home was a member of Elemental Excelerator’s Go-to-market Track in 2014 and developed a go-to-market strategy that focused on managers of multi-family housing and developers that manage large numbers of homes, such as Forest City’s military housing. The company executed a pilot project with Forest City’s military housing on Oahu to validate their growth strategy.

Pono Home was accepted into Elemental Excelerator’s 2016 Demonstration Track and is implementing a project with Hawaii Energy, Hawaii’s ratepayer-funded energy efficiency utility, and the Hawaii Public Housing Authority. The company is providing energy efficiency upgrades to residents of low-income housing and reducing their monthly energy bills.

The solution.

Propagate Ventures is an agroforestry investment platform that makes it easy for farmers to access the operational know-how, workflow tools, and capital they need to install tree-crop systems (row crop and grazing operations). Propagate’s streamlined deployment & underwriting process serves as a due-diligence funnel that quantifies risk and identifies investment potential for integrating fruit, nut, and timber into farmland in order to decrease transaction time and cost. Adding trees and shrubs not only builds soil health and sequesters carbon, but also increases farm profitability.

Proterra was started in 2004 to provide clean and affordable public transportation options for everyone. The company believes that mass transit buses provide the highest value application for battery electric technology.

The solution.

Proterra designs and manufactures the world’s most technically advanced battery electric buses. By building its own buses, the company can now beat the performance and cost of fossil fuel buses. The Proterra Catalyst bus has a durable and lightweight carbon-reinforced body, and can travel more than 400 miles on a single charge.

What makes them special?

Proterra provides clean, quiet and reliable transportation options that cost less over time. Proterra’s battery electric buses dwarf the efficiency of combustion and hybrid engine buses by achieving 28.1 MPGe, while producing no tailpipe emissions. For each bus, that means avoiding more than 220,000 lbs. of CO2 emissions per year.

The Solution.

Rebound Technologies has developed a freeze point suppression cycle that enables agile cooling and humidity control for frozen food processors and cold chain logistics companies. Rebound’s IcePoint® offers next generation cooling flexibility in an otherwise fixed capacity, legacy equipment world. This agile cooling allows for leaner cold chain operations with optimized productivity. A globally patented technology, Rebound’s IcePoint® meets varying cooling demands and simultaneously offers moisture removal which equates to improved system performance and excellent return on investment. IcePoint easily retrofits into existing food processing facilities and refrigerated warehouses. Rebound is preparing its initial production release for commercial delivery in 2021. Rebound Technologies has previously received funding from the National Science Foundation, The U.S. DOE, Clean Energy Ventures, Skyview Ventures, and others.

What makes them special?

Rebound’s team is unique in its ability to imagine new cutting edge thermodynamic cycles like the freeze point suppression cycle while staying market driven and economically grounded. The result is IcePoint. IcePoint is a fresh approach to refrigeration and dehumidification built from the ground up. Logistics customers gain a flexible asset that greatly improves the efficiency of their operations. Food processors seamlessly ramp throughput while meeting USDA requirements. Agile freezing capacity, inherent dehumidification and embedded thermal storage all in one package.

The solution.

Remix is the leading platform for shaping urban mobility, helping cities to plan, design, and manage their transportation systems — from public transit to street design to shared mobility (like scooters and bikeshare). It is the only cloud-based planning software that integrates street design, transit planning, and mobility management, and includes map-based street planning, analysis of existing conditions, and customizable visualizations and analytics. Designed to work within existing transportation planning and engineering processes, Remix’s platform empowers local governments to explore concepts, make informed decisions with data, and rally communities around their vision — so that ultimately cities are safe, accessible and equitable for everyone.

About moovel (formerly Ridescout)

Update: Ridescout was acquired by Daimler in 2014. In 2016, Daimler Chrysler created the mobility services subsidiary Moovel Group to house Austin-based Ridescout and Portland-Based GlobeSherpa to create a streamlined service where riders can get real-time data on transit schedules, buy their ticket, and order on-demand rides all through a smartphone app. Moovel focuses on connecting people to public transit and alternative transportation in North American cities.

The solution.

Scoot operates networks of thousands of shared electric vehicles in San Francisco, Barcelona and Santiago, serving tens of thousands of monthly riders who have collectively logged almost seven million electric miles. Scoot’s fleet of electric motor scooters, bicycles, and kick scooters provides mobility that is as fast as a car and as affordable as mass transit. The company’s state-of-the-art fleet management technology and customer-facing app facilitate accessible, affordable, and clean transportation for urban environments. After refining its operations through years of experience and learning, Scoot is expanding its reach to help cities cut back on pollution and congestion. The company launched in Santiago in October and plans to enter additional cities across Western Europe and the Americas over the next year.

In June 2019, Scoot was acquired by Bird. Together, Bird and Scoot will offer riders more vehicles featuring the latest technology advancements for the sharing market, and provide service in more communities, while helping cities meet their ambitious goals of reducing both automobile traffic and climate-changing carbon emissions. Scoot will continue to operate as Scoot, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bird. More information here.

In 2013, Shifted Energy was first formed as a project of Kanu Hawaii, a social platform cultivating a community around sustainable, place-based transformation. CTO, and founding CEO, Olin Lagon, launched Shifted Energy to focus on addressing two key issues: energy justice and renewable integration.

The solution.

Shifted Energy develops grid-interactive water heater systems. Their software plus hardware solution aggregates electric water heater capacity and provides control to the utility, allowing heaters to cycle on or off based on real-time needs of the grid. Cycling heaters on can absorb excess renewable power, such as daytime PV production or early-morning wind production, and can also provide ancillary services such as frequency regulation for the grid. Residents benefit from energy efficiency algorithms and controls built into Shifted’s software layer that helps to reduce energy use and electricity bills. In addition, aggregating electric water heaters can help utilities worldwide integrate intermittent renewables at scale.

What makes them special?

As part of Elemental Excelerator’s 2015 Demonstration track, Shifted Energy partnered with Hawaiian Electric to install 499 grid-interactive water heaters at a new multi-family housing complex on Oahu’s west side, creating 2.5 MWh of daily storage capacity to support the grid.

Welcome back, Shifted.

Shifted has returned to join Elemental Excelerator’s 2018 Go-to-market track. With a new CEO, Forest Frizell, strong roots in the Hawaii community, and exciting new hardware innovation, Shifted Energy is pivoting their go-to-market strategy to scale their solution worldwide.

About Sighten

Conlan O’Leary started Sighten after spending time at Clean Power Finance, a leading residential solar financing platform, and in technology, investment banking, and commodities trading. He saw a need for better software tools for small- to medium-sized solar companies in order to reduce the cost of solar and increase access to PV.

Sighten provides a comprehensive software toolset that handles the entire workflow for solar. The feature set supports the multiple stakeholders involved in successful solar deployment: originators, installers, financiers, and homeowners/offtakers, among others. The platform has several modules, including sales, operations, and reporting, all available in a modular fashion with related APIs.

Project Description

Through its project on Elemental Excelerator’s Demonstration Track, Sighten is working to deploy a comprehensive “solar +” software platform that goes beyond managing solar to enable installers to offer “solar + energy storage” and “solar + energy efficiency.” They enhance the core residential solar toolset with functionality specifically focused on modeling, marketing, and financing energy efficiency and energy storage projects. This is especially important to enable solar installers to work with hard-to-reach populations who may not have the financial track record or use characteristics of a typical residential PV customer. Sighten is working with up to 10 contractors in Hawaii during the pilot phase.

CEO Daniel White founded The Behaviouralist with Professor Robert Hahn and Professor Robert Metcalfe – leading academics in behavioral economics. The Behaviouralist incubated the technology and team in the UK before spinning out Signol to tackle rising CO2 emissions through improved productivity – starting with the airline industry.

The Solution.

Signol uses behavioral science to frame and deliver information to incentivize efficient fuel use in the transportation sector. The software analyzes airline captains’ fuel consumption on a flight and then produces incentives to reach fuel-efficiency targets. Unlike other efforts that focus on technological or more general behavioral solutions, Signol focuses on changing an individual’s decisions to reducing fuel use, increase employee satisfaction, and improve sustainability. Combined with fuel and operational savings, Signol has the potential to be a rare win-win-win.

What makes them special?

Signol partnered with Virgin Atlantic Airways to conduct the first-ever behavioral field experiment with airline captains. Over an eight-month period and more than 40,000 unique flights, Signol reduced CO2 emissions by 55 million lbs and saved the airline more than $5 million.

About Smart Yields

Hawaii-based Smart Yields was founded by a group of friends with backgrounds in agriculture, technology, and business who wanted to use data to help small- to medium-sized farmers. The team at Smart Yields used their expertise to reach these farmers and help them utilize data to optimize their yields. While not as immediately lucrative as industrial farming operations, small- to medium-sized farms actually make up 85% of the farms in the U.S. and 99% globally – representing far more people whose livelihoods depend on smaller farming operations. Smart Yields uses a wide array of sensors (their API is hardware agnostic) and data and offers a single platform for farmers to visualize and manage their information. Smart Yields provides simple, actionable insights that farmers use to optimize plant production, water usage, and labor management. It’s smart farms for the masses.

Smart Yields also sees its role as helping to foster the next generation of growers and farmers. They engage with local elementary, middle, and high school classrooms to enable hands-on learning laboratories through school farms that help inspire kids to explore the environment and think about sustainability. Smart Yields works with educators to boost student engagement by giving them a compelling new connection to their gardens both inside and outside the classroom.

Solar Analytics was founded in 2013 by a team of passionate, solar pioneers. Stefan Jarnason, John Laird, Valantis Vais, and Renate Egan have been working together for over 20 years to reduce the cost of rooftop solar. Since launching in 2015, the company now has over 20,000 users in 5 countries and is the leading solar monitoring provider in Australia and one of the fastest growing worldwide.

The solution.

Solar Analytics has developed a SaaS solution that connects consumers with their energy generation and demand. Using real-time energy and weather data, Solar Analytics maximizes solar system performance, ensures customers are optimizing their load, and provides the insights needed to decide when to install new energy assets such as storage.

The next evolution of Solar Analytics’ software and hardware and the company’s work with Elemental Excelerator – enables peer-to-peer energy sharing without blockchain. Solar owners will be able to maximize the value of their solar and sell their surplus solar electricity to those who need it most; renters or other consumers who are unable to install solar will have access to clean energy generation.

When Solstice co-founder and CEO Steph Speirs was working for the Obama White House in Yemen, she would look out the windows of armored SUVs and see thousands of Yemenis waiting in line for fuel. She saw that affordable clean energy access should be a human right, yet the global economy’s addiction to oil left ordinary citizens without the power they needed. Steph left her job determined to work to deploy renewable energy and bring clean, distributed, and democratized energy to the people who needed it the most. After stints in India and Pakistan selling renewable energy to off-grid communities, Steph and her co-founders Steve Moilanen and Sandhya Murali realized that most people back home in America were still locked out of the clean energy market as well. They co-founded Solstice with the objective of putting affordable solar in the hands of every American, regardless of their income or the roof they possessed.

The solution.

Solar is booming and the technology is cheaper than ever, yet 80% of Americans are effectively locked out of the solar market. These households include those who rent their homes, own a condo, have inadequate credit, or possess a non-optimal roof. Solstice deploys “community solar”, which enables households to subscribe to a shared solar “garden” in their neighborhood. Participants immediately begin saving 10% on their monthly utility bills and there is no cost to join.

Many solar developers lack the capacity to find and manage thousands of customers at a time, but their community solar projects cannot get financed until they aggregate demand. That’s where Solstice comes in. Solstice’s digital platform is a turnkey customer solution handling every stage of the customer journey –enrollment, underwriting, acquisition, billing, management, and service.

What makes them special?

Solstice is the only company that employs both community organizing and a digital technology to acquire and manage customers, which allows them to offer their services at low cost, at scale, and with superior customer experience. While other companies focus on either lead generation or software development, Solstice handles every stage of the customer journey, from enrollment to ongoing management.

Solstice has also invented the EnergyScore, a new, proprietary underwriting standard for solar customers that is more accurate in predicting who will pay their utility bill and more inclusive of low-income Americans than FICO credit scores (the industry standard).

Everyone experiences some form of water stress and globally, across the socio-economic spectrum, 2.1 billion people live without access to safe water. Source water has one purpose: to perfect water for every person in every place.

The solution.

SOURCE’s Hydropanels use the power of the sun and advanced materials science to create drinking water. Installed on your roof or on the ground, SOURCE extracts water vapor from the air to make, mineralize, and deliver drinking water to your tap. Whether at a home in the U.S. or on a farm in Australia, SOURCE puts safe, high-quality water production into the hands of every person in nearly every climate and corner of the world.

What makes them special?

Uniquely independent of infrastructure, SOURCE is the only technology capable of making high-quality, delicious drinking water without plugging into an electric or water supply.

The solution.

Span is advancing clean energy adoption with innovative hardware and software that replaces residential electrical panels to become the primary energy and control hub for the home. The result is a far superior customer experience and easier, more cost-effective solar + storage installations.

SparkMeter was born out of a utility company. As a remote distributed microgrid operator, the utility was in search of a smart metering company specializing in remote monitoring, prepayment, and active load control. They were unable to find a cost-effective solution. Sensing a huge opportunity for a growing market, SparkMeter’s founders decided to spin out as a private company to solve the challenges rural utilities encounter at an affordable price point.

The solution.

SparkMeter’s mission is to increase access to electricity in hard-to-reach and underserved markets. They provide smart metering solutions tailored to rural and central utilities in emerging markets, where 2.1 billion people live without reliable electricity access. The simple plug-and-play solution enables utilities operating in remote locations to access a range of features – prepaid billing, customer communications, and remote monitoring and control – that improve their operations, reduce energy theft, improve reliability and achieve financial sustainability.

What makes them special?

1. Versatility. The four meter models service residential, small- and medium-sized business, and line loss monitoring requirements.
2. Singular focus on emerging markets. They intimately understand the challenges facing our customers. This informs everything from the low price point to the plug-and-play install that allows low-skill labor to install systems.
3. Real-time remote monitoring. Grid operators can monitor their grid remotely through the cloud and also receive field alerts and reports based on real-time conditions.
4. Robustness. SparkMeter has the most robust communications on the market through our proprietary wireless mesh network. This allows communications and operational flexibility.